I was playing around with Picasa the other day and decided to see what it would take to plug my Photo Gallery Maker gallery into Picasa. Turns out it’s relatively easy. I’ll save the “How does this thing work” post for later. For now, I’ve posted an installer and a zip of the templates. I’ve only tested the installer on Windows 64-bit, so if it doesn’t work you can download the .zip and do a manual install.

I haven’t made any updates to it in a while and I don’t intend to, so I thought it right to make a note about my plans with my D&D Character Builder.

I’m done maintaining it, at least for now. It is too large a project for me to work on in my spare time.

That being said, the source is available here, released under the GPL version 3. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I might eventually come back to this project, but since at the moment it’s just sitting there, I thought it proper to make the source officially available.

After I built my new computer, I went to put a photo gallery together and realized my Photo Gallery app ran at about the same speed as it did on my old PC. I was running all the thumbnailing and image scaling in a single thread, so it was only taking advantage of one core (and I have a simulated EIGHT in my new PC) no matter what. So I fixed it.

Photo Gallery Maker 1.2 has support for multi-core systems. It will run ([number of simulated cores] / 2 + 1) threads for thumbnailing and image scaling. Just about every system available today should see a noted improvement from version 1.1.

There was also some funny stretching going on with the thumbnails on the generated web page. I fixed that too.

Up until now my blog was hosted on blogger. Since I pay for web hosting, I thought I’d see about hosting my blog myself. So I started digging into WordPress. I moved my personal blog over to WordPress a while back, and that has gone well.

So today I decided it was about time to move this blog over as well. So welcome to my new blog

If you happen to be thinking of moving from blogger to a personally hosted blog, this guide should prove helpful. It helped me immensely.

P.S. The formatting will be a work in progress for a while. That’s how things went with my other blog. As I poke around in the archives I’ll sort out the CSS for things…

Ok, so the Facebook folks have cleared up the problems I was having publishing an app I wrote, and I thought I’d do a quick writeup to announce it. It’s a relatively simple app for viewing your friends’ albums. I had one main goal:

View all your friends’ photos without having to load multiple webpages

Facebook is particularly frustrating for me in that every photo is on its own web page. It’s good because they can load new ads for you, but awful for a person who want to take a quick look through an album. So I put together an app I named SlickPhoto:

I wrote this app in Flex, which means it’s a Flash app. Now, it started with a single goal, but I ended up with some features that are worth noting:

Download any Facebook album as a zip file – Good for Facebook stalkers

Slideshows – View any album as a slideshow

Full Screen Mode – Both browsing and slideshows can be viewed in full screen mode.

Link to albums – You can create a link that will load directly into an album you want to view in SlickPhoto. You can email this link to your friends so they can go directly into SlickPhoto to look at your album.

It’s a relatively simple interface, so you can jump right in by going directly to SlickPhoto, or you can view the application profile before you start using it (although there isn’t much there at the moment). Note that SlickPhoto, like all my other Flash-based apps, has a form for submitting bugs so if you run into any problems feel free to contact me that way.

Now, if I could just figure out how to add search tags so people can find it easier through the Facebook search interface….

So I recently wrote a Facebook app for browsing photos. You can try it here if you’d like. It was mostly an experiment to learn about what it’s like to go through the whole process of getting an app into the Facebook app directory. Well, my app has been “approved”, but I haven’t made a post about it on my blog yet because it still hasn’t actually shown up in the Facebook app directory. It’s been approved for oh, I dunno, two months now?

I browsed the Facebook dev forums and came across a couplethreads about this problem. This has been going on for a while. There are posts from the Facebook admins about it being fixed, and replies saying “no, it isn’t”. This has been going on for quite a while (over a year based on one of the threads).

I find it very interesting that such a popular thing has been broken for so long. I’m lucky since I don’t have any monetary interest in getting my app on the directory, but I can imagine this being a serious problem for people who make a living on Facebook apps. Perhaps the higher profile apps get better service and haven’t run into this problem. I dunno.

At any rate, I thought I’d make a post about this to pass the time while I wait for my app to show up in the directory. Once it’s up there, I’ll go over the features and make it official.

A while back, I posted a tool for researching stock tickers. Well, after that post I went back into the code and added some functionality for saving preferences. Also around that time, my daily stock watching drifted into just checking the indexes, and that code was forgotten… until today!

I got a request for the source code to MM Ticker Browser, and since my subversion repository no longer has the old code, I figured I’d make an official post about it. I never got around to testing or using the preferences code much, so it may have a couple bugs. That’s why there’s a bug reporting interface in it :D.

I was working with Photo Gallery Maker recently and decided it needed a bit of an update. Key changes are as follows:

You can now have Photo Gallery Maker include a .zip file of all the photos in your gallery. If you do this, there will be a “download all photos” link in the title bar allowing viewers of your gallery to download the photos. You can include the original photos or the resized versions in the .zip file.

You can now save and load your gallery as xml.

I’ve adjusted the look and feel of the full size image (shown when you click a thumbnail).

You can now view the images in a slideshow. A slideshow control panel is shown if you mouse over a full size image.

I’ve also fixed a few bugs:

There was a nasty memory leak in the image processing code. If you were working with large images, it would most likely run out of memory.

Drag and drop should drop to the correct position now. It was off by one in certain cases.

If one of your images was sufficiently tall, it would overflow onto the caption. I’ve fixed this by causing the thumbnail to get squashed if it’s too tall. The full size version remains unchanged.

This build includes a library called SharpZipLib, which is available under the GPL. As such, source code is not included in the installer (you won’t notice it unless you’re trying to). A file called source.zip contains all source code, and it is copied into the Photo Gallery Maker folder in Program Files.